"Countless hours of hard work, hectoliters of coffee, tons of improvements, two version numbers skipped, and here it is: the all-new Opera for desktop is now out as an Opera Next version, Opera's channel for what used to be called beta. Made from scratch, this version is available for Windows and Mac and brings a new, elegant design and a bunch of new features that will make your browsing experience sleeker and easier than ever." The first version using something called 'Chromium's engine' - I guess they can't call it WebKit anymore, but they can't call it Blink yet either. It's looking great, but the bookmark functionality seems to not have been implemented yet in this preview

Opera's claims to contribute to Chromium are ridiculous. The whole reason for Blink is that Google found that not even Apple's contributions to WebKit were enough to offset the hassle of dealing with a shared browser engine. So there is no reason to expect that Google will be interested in the contributions of another company that is much smaller than Apple.

As someone who never really used Opera I was under the impression that it was the innovative features (many of which was later implemented in other browsers) which set it apart, not the rendering engine.

The whole reason for Blink is that Google found that not even Apple's contributions to WebKit were enough to offset the hassle of dealing with a shared browser engine. So there is no reason to expect that Google will be interested in the contributions of another company that is much smaller than Apple.

Not quiet. Google was using Webkit1, while Apple was moving to Webkit2, and Google had no intention to moving from Webkit1 to Webkit2, since the main difference between the two is that Webkit2 uses several processes for rendering, while Webkit1 is single process. And Chrome uses a different multiprocess approach, and they had no attention of changing it. So in effect, Google was working on Webkit1, and Apple on Webkit2, and Google figured that it would be easier to just rename Webkit1 blink and not depend on Apple's webkit infrastructure.

Opera's claims to contribute to Chromium are ridiculous. The whole reason for Blink is that Google found that not even Apple's contributions to WebKit were enough to offset the hassle of dealing with a shared browser engine. So there is no reason to expect that Google will be interested in the contributions of another company that is much smaller than Apple.

Pure nonsense. Not only has Opera already contributed to Chromium, but Google welcomed them with open arms. They even mentioned Opera specifically in their Blink announcement!